Sleeping Beauties

“Good day, mother,” said the Princess, “what are you doing?” “I am spinning,” answered the old woman, nodding her head. “What thing is that that twists round so briskly?” asked the maiden, and
taking the spindle into her hand she began to spin; but no sooner had she touched it than the evil prophecy was fulfilled, and she pricked her finger with it. In that very moment she fell back upon the bed that stood there, and lay in a deep sleep, and this sleep fell upon the whole castle.

(Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," 1812)



Yesterday - Friday here in the Far East - I spent most of the day in a state of amazement. Though I am dubious of Kim Jong Un's ultimate ambitions on the Korean Peninsula,(1) his very presence in the Korean Demilitarized Zone across a table from South Korean president Moon Jae-In, and walking side by side with him, planting a tree and even having what looked like a friendly conversation away from microphones, was an amazing spectacle. 

However unconvinced I am that Kim has turned over a new leaf, this has to be an immeasurably heartening moment for Koreans - in the south, that is. Who knows what the North Koreans have even heard about the meeting? I have written about the year I spent (1997-98) in what the U. S. Army calls Area One in South Korea, the area between Seoul and the DMZ, so my interest in what happens next is personal. Since everyone is speculating about possible conditions prior to actual negotiations for peace, I suggest only one: how about a Kim-free Korean peninsula?

But earlier on Friday, in the wee hours, I was equally amazed when I learned that Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of sexual assault in a court in Pennsylvania. I have not mentioned Cosby in the years since women started to come forward with accusations, most of them remarkably similar, that he drugged them and had sex with them when they were unconscious. Like most people, I believed the women's stories, and not simply because, eventually, there were so many of them. 

I am rapidly approaching the age of 60 (less than three weeks!), so I remember watching I Spy when I was a boy and listening to some of Cosby's many comedy albums. I didn't hear his Fat Albert stories until later. Then there was The Cosby Show from 1984  until 1992. It was easy to like Cosby by then - an innocuous wise old man. His chastisement of young black comics (like Eddie Murphy) who used foul language in their comedy was a little silly - especially now that we know about Cosby's dirty little secret. 

Phylicia Rashad, who played Cosby's wife in his hit TV series, made some callous statements after the first victims came forward with their stories. After trying to walk her remarks back, Rashad then insisted that "What I said is this is not about the women. This is about something else. This is about the obliteration of legacy." However much she may have tried to defend Cosby's "legacy," it's all over by now. 

Whatever it's called by psychoanalysts, it's clear that Cosby had a definite taste for performing sex acts with helpless, defenseless women who were unaware of what he was doing. There is an interesting precedent for Cosby's strange behavior from an unlikely source: a 1961 novella by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata called The House of the Sleeping Beauties. It tells the story of an old gentleman named Eguchi who frequents an exclusive brothel that caters to old men who want to pay an unnamed sum of money to spend the night sleeping next to a naked young woman. The women with whom they spend the night are sufficiently drugged to make confidentiality certain. They're involvement in the transaction is voluntary, or, to use the legal term, "consensual." 

Eguchi is informed that sex with the young woman is forbidden. The first sentences of the novella make this prohibition explicit: "He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort." But the simple fact that the girl is naked (beneath a quilt) arouses the expectation in the reader that some form of sexual contact is taking place. 

Given the key to the room, Eguchi smokes a cigarette outside the door. "He was a light sleeper, given to bad dreams. A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned'. It was a line that Eguchi could not forget. Remembering it now, he wondered whether the girl asleep.. no, put to sleep.. in the next room might be like a corpse from a drowning. And he felt some hesitation about going to her. He had not heard how the girl had been put to sleep. She would in any case be in an unnatural stupor, not conscious of events around her, and so she might have the muddy, leaden skin of one racked by drugs. There might be dark circles under her eyes, her ribs might show through a dry, shriveled skin. Or she might be cold, bloated, puffy. She might be snoring slightly, her lips parted to show purplish gums. In his sixty-seven years old Eguchi had passed ugly nights with women. Indeed, the ugly nights were the hardest ones to forget. The ugliness had had to do not with the appearance of the women, but with their tragedies, their warped lives. He did not want to add another such episode, at his age, to the record. So ran his thoughts, on the edge of the adventure. But could there be anything uglier than an old man lying the night through beside a girl put to sleep, unwaking? Had he not come to this house seeking the ultimate in the ugliness of old age?"

Eguchi enters the room: "He locked the door, drew the curtain and looked down at the girl. She was not pretending. Her breathing was of the deepest sleep. He caught his breath. She was more beautiful than he had expected. And her beauty was not the only surprise. She was young too. She lay on her left side, her face toward him. He could not see her body, but she would not yet be twenty. It was as if another heart beat its wings in old Eguchi's chest." After he undresses, Eguchi slips under the quilt next to the girl. "She was not a living doll, for there could be no living dolls. But, so as not to shame an old man no longer a man, she had been made into a living toy. No, not a toy. For the old man, she could be life itself. Such life was, perhaps, life to be touched with confidence."   

Doing what he was told to do, Eguchi slips into reveries, and finally sleeps beside the unconscious girl. He dreams. Eventually he dreams of his mother, until the sight of blood oozing from a fish she had cooked in his dream wakes him: "Old Eguchi awoke with a groan. He shook his head, but he was still in a daze. He was facing the dark girl. Her body was cold. He started up. She was not breathing. He felt her breasts. There was no pulse. He leaped up. He staggered and fell. Trembling violently, he went into the next room. The call button was in the alcove. He heard footsteps below."

How long must it have taken Bill Cosby to work out the correct dosage of whatever he was using to drug his victims? And how far was he prepared to go to exercise his power, his control over his sexual encounters with all those women? Rape - non-consensual sexual contact with another person - is a kind of murder - the taking of something that was not his to be taken, that would otherwise not be given: another person's physical integrity. Perhaps Cosby is lucky that his peculiar sexual practices hadn't, after all the years he practiced them, resulted in charges of murder?


(1) Kim's statement that "New history begins now" sounds suspiciously like Pol Pot's declaration to the Cambodian people that it was "Year Zero." What he meant - in true Marxist fashion - was that the political struggle of history was over.

La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret

When Émile Zola decided that he wanted to write a novel including characters belonging to his fictional Rougon-Macquart family set during the Second French Empire (1852 to 1870) that would most accurately and powerfully express his deeply anti-clerical convictions, arguing specifically against the Catholic Church's draconian insistence on the celibacy of its ordained priests, he created La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret,(1) that contains his usual naturalistic style describing how Serge Mouret, a 26-year-old priest, arrives in Les Artaud, a very poor and isolated parish in the south of France, about the extremity and austerity of his devotion to his faith, specifically as it pertains to an idolatry of the Virgin Mary, and about the complete indifference of the people of Artaud toward religious observance, their almost animalistic lives surrounded by farm animals.

While Serge's retarded sister Desirée delights in the natural surroundings, he finds himself bewildered by his attraction to Albine, the pretty niece of Jeanbernat, an old man who presides over a dilapidated estate called Paradou surrounded by a lush, overgrown garden. Jeanbernat is a rather bigoted atheist, and won't tolerate any talk of God. Albine is almost a wild animal herself - uneducated and passionate. She is attracted to Serge, and becomes his nurse when he suffers an emotional breakdown. Zola then adopts a different style of writing, more psychological and impressionistic, as if his settings come alive. Taken to Paradou after his breakdown, Serge forgets he is a priest and acts on his attraction to Albine, who encourages him to be her "husband."

Deeply symbolic, with obvious parallels to Adam and Eve in Eden, the second section of the novel is remarkably different from the first. These two contrasting parts of the novel reminded me of one of my favorite musical compositions, Debussy's "Sacred and Profane Dances," which begins with a stately severity but then dissolves into a hypnotic, sensuous waltz. But Debussy resolved the piece abruptly, whereas Zola carried it into third act. Serge suddenly remembers he is a priest and, overcome with shame and repentance, abandons Albine and Paradou to return to his priestly duties. Unable to comprehend Serge's rejection of her, Albine dies after she seals herself in her airtight room smothered in flowers. Serge performs a funeral rite for her, "Requiescat in pace," just as Desirée's cow is delivered of a calf.

Despite Zola's anticlerical convictions, he manages to make his priest, Serge, sympathetic by contrasting his faith, which is a gentle one centered on Mother Mary, with that of an altogether loathsome character, Brother Archangias, who chooses instead to worship at the feet of a gruesome crucified Jesus. Zola wrote in a style that became known as naturalism (though Zola didn't call it that), which is nothing but the presentation of things as they are and life as it is lived, not idealized or stylized in any way. No dramatic flummery. The style had its first impact on the theater around the turn of the century, and it was passed smoothly to film by some of France's first filmmakers, André Antoine and Louis Delluc. But Zola's unflinching descriptions of nature got him into some trouble with censorship. L'Abbe Mouret, for example, wasn't given an unexpurgated translation in the U.S. until the 1950s.(2) 

But Book II, set in an intentionally ethereal landscape within the confines of a walled-in garden, is written in a very different style - impressionistic, almost surreal. It was this part of the novel that, I think, attracted Georges Franju to make a film of Zola's novel in 1970. Often described as "fantastic realism," Franju's filmmaking style was at its best in his depictions of Serge and Albine's dreamlike idyll inside Paradou.

Franju is a fascinating figure in French cinema. After military service in Algeria, he worked as a theatrical set designer. On meeting Henri Langlois, together they created a film club, made a short film called Le Métro, and in 1936 founded the Cinemathèque Française. La faute de l'Abbé Mouret was Franju's next-to-last film. One wonders why he chose to plunge himself (and us) in Zola's distant world. Though best remembered for the horror film Eyes Without a Face, his best film is Thérèse Desqueyroux, based on the Mauriac novel. He retired from filmmaking to take over as artistic director of the Cinémathèque Française upon the death of Langlois in 1977.

Zola's novel and Franju's film question what is natural and unnatural in a man's life (particularly a young man) and what is sane and insane behavior. There is a cruel irony in the depictions of Serge's fervent observance of priestly rituals and his passionate prayers to a statue of a beautiful Holy Virgin. He is disturbed by the natural lives of the people of Artaud, their purely physical, sexual lives, and by his natural attraction to Albine. They lead him to total physical and mental breakdown. In Paradou he experiences a life of the senses for the first time. He becomes a man, a sexual being. But only because he suffers amnesia - he has forgotten himself and the strict, inhuman rules imposed by his calling. He returns to his senses  only to resume a life that denies the part of himself, perhaps the best part, that he discovered with Albine. He loses his innocence not at the hands of Albine but when his knowledge is restored, the guilt-stricken life of a priest.

In a related story, Pope Francis announced on April 11 that he committed "grave errors" in his handling of sexual abuse accusations made against a Chilean bishop. The Pope's appointment in 2015 of Bishop Juan Barros, the protegée of Rev. Fernando Karadima, found guilty by a Vatican judge of numerous acts of sexual abuse, has led to violent protests and, this past week, the firebombing of several churches in Chile. On an official visit to Latin America, the Pope stated that he refused to believe that Barros had any knowledge of the abuse without proof. On his return to Rome, however, the Pope apologized and begged the forgiveness of the victims. “From now on I ask forgiveness of all those I offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks,” Francis wrote.

This is only the latest scandal in the ongoing exposure of paedophile Catholic priests. The problem of sexual abuse carried out by ordained priests boils down to the Church's ancient insistence on celibacy - on the sexual denial of men and women under Holy Orders. The priests' enforced celibacy, their deliberate isolation from all sexual practices, has clearly led to serious sexual abuse committed by many priests. I wonder if Zola would've been surprised that, 143 years after La faute de l'Abbé Mouret's publication, the problem of the celibacy of Catholic priests would remain unresolved.

The film's weakest point is the casting of the lead roles, Serge and Albine. Francis Huster, who was 22 when the film was made, has the look and the fervor of Serge, but he is far too insubstantial to carry the film. Gillian Hills will be remembered - forever I hope - as "The Brunette" in Antonioni's Blow-Up. (Her hills were on display in virtually every film she appeared in.) She is pretty but utterly unalluring as the elemental wood nymph Albine. In the novel, she is practically a natural force and is completely pagan. In the film, her great sex scene with Francis Huster (in which they - ostensibly - both lose their virginity) has zero fire and cannot even rise to the level of softcore porn. There is another sex scene at the beginning of the film between Rosalie and Fortuné that is more successfully erotic, but only because the actress playing Rosalie (Silvie Feit) is clearly unabashed at being naked.

The character of Desirée was eliminated by Franju, but Franju's most significant alteration of Zola's novel was his ending. In the film, after the chaotic scene in which Albine's coffin is lowered into the grave, and Jeanbernat suddenly appearing to slice off Brother Archangias's ear, Serge returns alone to the church and, gazing rapturously at the statue of the Holy Virgin, he holds out his arms as the statue is transformed into a radiant image of Albine, whom Serge kisses tenderly. It is a striking and gloriously disturbing final image, accompanied beautifully by Jean Wiener's music. It is Albine's beatification, but for the exclusive use of Serge. I could almost hear Alex, the hero of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, saying "I was cured all right."(3)


(1) The title has been variously (mis)translated as L'Abbe Mouret's Transgression and The Sin of Father Mouret ("sin" in French is "péché."). A more accurate title might be Father's Mouret's Mistake. 
(2) And the distribution of the film in the U.S. was held up until 1977. 
(3) Gillian Hills also appeared in Kubrick's film of A Clockwork Orange. She was one of the girls Alex took home for an impromptu orgy to the accompaniment of an electronic William Tell Overture.

Miloš Forman

News of the death of Miloš Forman was announced today. He died last Friday at the age of 86. I was astonished to discover that he was an orphan and made only ten films in a fifty year career. 

It is always tempting when discussing the work of an émigré artist (especially an émigré filmmaker) to prize his work in his homeland (in this case, Czechoslovakia) over his Hollywood work - when there are so many examples of great filmmakers who answered the siren call of Hollywood and found a great falling off - sometimes precipitous - in the quality of their work. Forman would probably have pointed out that working creatively in an "Eastern bloc" country was like trying to conduct a symphony orchestra while wearing a straight jacket. But the limitations that communist censorship imposed on filmmakers did manage to result in good work. 

Having seen eight of his films, I found it impossible not to like his Czech feature films, Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball, even if they were not as good as the work of his fellow Czechs - Jiří Menzel, Ivan Passer, and Jaromil Jireš. He showed an affection for his characters that I found lacking in his Hollywood work.

I think Forman's best Hollywood film was The People vs. Larry Flynt. It was a splendid dramatization of one of the most important legal cases in U.S. history - in which the 1st Amendment of the Constitution had to be invoked to protect one of the most repellent people in America (even if Jerry Falwell was immeasurably more repellent than Larry Flynt). But Forman will be remembered for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, both of which won Best Picture Oscars. I preferred Valmont, his adaptation of Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to Stephen Frears' desperately miscast version. His film of the musical Hair had the irresistible choreography of Twyla Tharp, even if the film was about ten years out of date. And Man on the Moon was hamstrung by one of the creepiest impersonations (Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman) I've ever seen.

I hope that his death will spark renewed interest in the films of the Czech New Wave, which resulted in so many fine films, including Closely Watched Trains, The Cry, Romeo, Juliet and the Darkness, Intimate Lighting, and The Joke. Some of the directors of these films stayed in Czechoslovakia and, after seeing their films banned, worked under conditions that eventually crippled their creativity. Forman, who departed Czechoslovakia after the '68 Prague Spring, faced none of these problems, but had to endure the equally insurmountable one of scraping up the money to get his risky films in Hollywood made. Sadly it is impossible for me to tell which side came out on top.

Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman, 18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018.

Two Assassinations

[Even as the comic book superhero movie Black Panther continues to rake in millions in box office receipts, providing black people with - ostensibly - a positive role model, the 50th anniversary of a genuine black hero's - Martin Luther King, Jr.'s - assassination arrived on April 4. The occasion was marked by reflections on King's great physical courage during his last days. Knowing that so many people wanted him dead and that an attempt on his life was imminent, he continued to make public appearances and refused to give up his civil rights crusade. CNN revisited the seedy Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, reminding us of what a tight budget the Nobel Peace Prize-winner was living on, with Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, even the balcony where King was struck in the chin by the assassin's bullet. Looking at Jackson and Young, both portly old men, made me wonder how King himself might have looked if he were still living. He would be 89 this year.

The following was written at the time of the murder of Gandhi in 1948 by Dwight Macdonald, just twenty years before King's assassination. Though not as well known as George Orwell's "Reflections on Gandhi," Macdonald's essay is an impressive tribute to the man from whom Martin Luther King, Jr. learned the most about politics.]


SAINTS

GANDHI

"A moment before he was shot, he said--some witnesses believed he was speaking to the assassin-'you are late."' N. Y. World-Telegram, January 30, 1948


And indeed the man who killed Gandhi with three revolver shots was late - about two years late. The communal massacres showed that Gandhi's teaching of non-violence had not penetrated to the Indian masses. His life work had been invain - or at least it now appeared that he had taught a "non-violence of the weak" which had been effective against the British but that the more difficult "non-violence of the strong" he had been unable to teach. He insisted on his failure constantly, and constantly thought of death. "I am in thc midst of flames," he wrote last spring. "Is it the kindness of God or His irony that the flames do not consume me?" One imagines that he experienced a dreadful joy in the split-second he saw the gun aimed at him. 

Three historical events have moved me deeply of recent years: the murder of Trotsky, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the murder of Gandhi. That all three should be simply catastrophes - hopeless, destructive, painful - is in the style of our period. The Spanish Civil War was the last of the 19th-century type of political tragedies: the fight was lost, as in I848 or the Paris Commune, but it had been a fight; there was hope while it was going on, and defeat might be due to some temporary relation of forces; there was a basis for a future effort. 

But Trotsky and Gandhi were killed not during their great time of struggle to realize "Utopian" ideals, not while they were still fighting with a hope of success, but after their ideas - or at least their tactics - had been shown by the brutal logic of events to be inadequate. They were not shot in battle. They were executed. And their executioner was not the oppressive, conservative forces they had devoted their lives to fighting the bourgeoisie and the British imperialists - but the scum that had frothed up from their own heroic struggle to liberate mankind: young fanatics representing a new order - of Stalinism and of Hindu nationalism - which is hopeless, deadening, corrupting and monstrous, but which is also, alas, partly the product of their own revolutionary efforts. In the 19th century, czars and governors and secret-police chiefs were assassinated by radicals; today, it is revolutionaries (out of power) like Trotsky and Gandhi who are killed by our modern Nihilists, while Stalin and Hitler and Zhdanov and Himmler and Mussolini, and Molotov escape (unless they lose a war). OUR Nihilists have terribly perverted Liebknecht's slogan: "The main Enemy is at Home". Or perhaps they are just more prudent than their 19th-century ancestors. Which would be in keeping, too. 

Gandhi, like Trotsky, was killed after his most profound ideas and his lifelong political activity had been rebuffed by History. But, also like Trotsky, he was still alive and kicking, still throwing out imaginative concepts. The ideologue is baffied, but the human being - and by this sentimental phrase I mean the acute intelligence as much as the moralist - is not through: he has plenty of inspirations and surprises in store for us. Both men were still giving, by their personal example and still more by their unwearied experimenting with general principles, some kind of meaning, of consciousness to modern political life. Their assassins killed not only two men, but also two cultures.Which makes it all the more painful.

There was obvious irony in the great pacifist being killed by a gunman. But there was also an esthetic fitness. Gandhi was the last eminent personage who insisted on dealing directly with people, reasoning with them face to face as individuals,not as crowds roped off, watched by plain-clothes men, sealedsafely behind bullet-proof glass. It was a matter of principle with him not to deny anyone access to him, mentally or physically. He refused all police protection. I have heard people say he was a damn fool and got what he might expect to get. They are, of course, right. Our world is so structured that the "public man" can survive only by being private, and the most dangerous thing he can do is to meet his public face to face.

Gandhi was the last political leader in the world who was a person, not a mask or a radio voice or an institution. The last on a human scale. The last for whom I felt neither fear nor contempt nor indifference but interest and affection. He was dear to me - I realize it now better than I did when he was alive - for all kinds of reasons. He believed in love, gentleness, persuasion, simplicity of manners, and he came closer to "living up to" these beliefs than most people I know - let alone most Big Shots, on whom the pressures for the reverse must be very powerful. (To me, the wonder is not that Gandhi often resorted to sophistry or flatly went back on some of his ideas, but that he was able to put into practice as many of them as he did. I speak from personal experience.) He was dear to me because he had no respect for railroads, assembly-belt production, and other knick-knacks of liberalistic Progress, and insisted on examining their human (as against their metaphysical) value.Also because he was clever, hurnorous, lively, hard-headed, and never made speeches about Fascism, Democracy, the Common Man, or World Government. And because he had a keen nose for the concrete, homely "details" of living which make the real difference to people but which are usually ignored by everybody except poets. And finally because he was a good man, by which I mean not only "good" but also "man". 

This leads into the next point. Many pacifists and others who have an ethical-and really admirable-attitude toward life are somewhat boring. Their point of view, their writing and conversation are wholly sympathetic but also a little on the dull side. 

Intellectually, their ideas lack subtlety and logical structure. Ethically, they are too consistent; they don't sense the tragedy of life, the incredible difficulty of actually putting into practice an ethical concept. They have not succumbed to temptation because they have never been tempted; they are good simply because it has never occurred to them to be bad. They are, in a word, unworldly. Gandhi was not at all unworldly. He was full of humour, slyness, perversity, and - above all - practicality. Indeed, the very thing which leads people to think of him as unworldly - his ascetic ideas about diet, household economy, and sexual intercourse - seems to me to show his worldliness, or at least his imaginative grasp of The World: how could anyone be so concerned about such matters, even though in a negative sense, without a real feeling for their importance in human life, which in turn must come from a deep drive on his part toward gluttony, luxury, and sexual indulgence? 

The Marxists, those monks of politics, were shocked by his intimacy with rich men like Birla and Tata, just as the Pharisees, the Trotskyists of their day, were shocked by Christ's sitting at table with bartenders. (The Marxist has a richer intellectual tradition than the pacifist, but his ethical sense is equally simplistic.) It is true that Gandhi "compromised" with the rich, those untouchables of the class struggle, living at their villas (though carrying on there his own ascetic regimen). But he also "compromised" with the poor, spending at least as much time in the "untouchable's" quarters (he constantly complains of the smells and lack of sanitation) as in the Birla Palace. In short, he practised tolerance and love to such an extent that he seems to have regarded the capitalist as well as the garbage-man as his social equal.

Politics, Winter, 1948

The Poet of Unhappiness

I read somewhere that A. E. Housman, Oxford scholar and author of the stubbornly popular poem cycle A Shropshire Lad, was a pallbearer at the funeral of Thomas Hardy. While there is plenty of reason why Housman should be a prominent player in the ceremony, I wonder if the anecdote is apocryphal, since Housman was 68 when Hardy died, and Oxford dons aren't known for their physical fitness.

It is now 82 years since Housman's death, since his being eulogized as the greatest elegist since Gray, and since the inevitable reaction against such fulsome praise - Cyril Connolly's critical attack on his poetry, Edmund Wilson's devastating demolition of his character (based on his life's work as a scholar of Latin), and a poem by W. H. Auden (which he later suppressed):

A.E.Housman

No one, not even Cambridge was to blame 
(Blame if you like the human situation): 
Heart-injured in North London, he became 
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust, 
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer; 
Food was his public love, his private lust 
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions 
He timidly attacked the life he led, 
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead, 
Where only geographical divisions 
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.(1)

Connolly may have provided a much-needed correction of Housman's overblown reputation ["(in A Shropshire Lad) the word 'lad' (one of the most vapid in the language) occurs sixty-seven times in sixty-three poems"], and Wilson, who only wanted to discover something new about Housman, gave us a window through which Housman's extreme professional jealousy - or zealotry - became clear. As for Auden, who perhaps might have been relied on to express some sympathy for Housman's extreme emotional limitations, the great wall he built around his love's grave, he knew well enough by then (1936) that real poetry could never enjoy as much popularity as A Shropshire Lad enjoyed. There must have been another reason for Housman's fame.

What was it? In his essay, "Inside the Whale," George Orwell noted that "Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born around 1900?" Orwell identified the deep nostalgia of a newly urbanized people for "country matters" and for rustic folk in much closer contact with the elements and the elemental nature of life.

But he also noticed that "all his themes are adolescent - murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death. They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up against the 'bedrock facts' of life." The power of Housman's poetry derives from its severe limitations. No matter where you open a volume of his poems, whether it's A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), or indeed the posthumous More Poems (1936) and Collected Poems (1939), "It is all more or less in the same tune." 

Edmund Wilson got more personal. Limiting his analysis to Housman's classical scholarship, whose life's work was the editing and annotating of the extant works of Manilius, the Astronomicon in five volumes, a Roman author whom Housman himself believed was, according to his colleague and earliest biographer A. S. F. Gow, "a facile and frivolous poet",(2) Wilson concluded that "It was a queer destiny, and one that cramped him - if one should not say rather that he had cramped himself.... There is an element of perversity, of self-mortification, in Housman's career all along.... Housman is closed from the beginning. His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral.... And Housman has managed to grow old without in a sense ever knowing maturity." Grouping him with the "monastic order of English acetics, Walter Pater and Lewis Carroll, Wilson comes closest to Housman's problem without actually naming it: "Alice and the Shropshire Lad and Marius the Epucurean are all beings of a looking-glass world, either sexless or with an unreal sex which turns only toward itself in the mirror of art."

Yet Wilson was moved sufficiently by Housman's fate to write a paragraph that glows with brilliant insight and emotion:

"It is only in the Latin verses - said to have been called by Murray the best since the ancient world - which Housman prefixed to his Manilius, in his few translations from Latin and Greek, and in his occasional literary essays, that the voice of the Shropshire Lad comes through - that voice which, once sped on its way, so quickly pierced the hearts and the minds of the whole English-speaking world and which went in vibrating for decades, disburdening hearts with its music that made loss and death and disgrace seem so beautiful, while poor Housman, burdened sorely forever, sat grinding and snarling at his texts. Would he have called back that voice if he could, as he recalled, or tried to recall, so much else? There are moments when his ill humour and his pedantry, his humility which is a perverse kind of pride, almost makes us think that he would."(3)

All of this suggests that Housman as a poet is a "special case" and undeserving of his fame. But, as Orwell suggested, "There is no need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one gets into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his poems ('Into my heart an air that kills', for instance, and 'Is my team ploughing?') that are not likely to remain long out of favour." Within his limits, Housman remains a fine - minor - poet.

I'm not sure if close textual analyses as that commonly practiced today would have disclosed the nature of Housman's great "fault" or if it could've been inferred from certain individual poems. A. E. Housman's brother Laurence was entrusted by him with his literary remains, among which was a diary that he'd kept when he was a student at Oxford in 1888-1891. Out of fear, perhaps, that it would tarnish his brother's reputation (which he had so scrupulously cultivated), in a move that now seems incredibly - almost calculatedly - prescient, in 1942 Laurence Housman handed a sealed packet containing the diary along with a 20-page essay in Laurence's handwriting titled "A. E. Housman's 'De Amicitia'", over "to Trustees of the British Museum with the stipulation that it was to remain unopened for twenty-five years."(4) True to the terms of their trusteeship, the packet was unsealed in 1967 and its contents turned over to Jonathan Cape, Housman's publisher. Laurence Housman's essay was published in the magazine Encounter. 

Laurence Housman's essay explicitly discusses A. E.'s feelings for a man, a Canadian, named Moses Jackson,[see photo] whom he had first met at Oxford in 1877 at the age of eighteen. They became close friends and remained so even after leaving Oxford and working in the Patent Office together until 1887. But A. E. had fallen in love with Jackson, a love that Jackson could neither accept nor return. "Around 1885," according to Laurence, A. E. and Jackson had a falling out and A. E. went what we would call "off the radar" for an entire week. No explanation was made for the disappearance, and it was never mentioned again. Jackson departed England to work in India at the end of 1887. In his diary of the period, A. E. tracks the progress of Jackson's ship all the way to its destination. Jackson didn't return to England until October 1889. His purpose for returning wasn't divulged to A. E. until afterward, when he was informed that Jackson had been married. Jackson and his bride departed for India without A. E. ever meeting him. They met for the last time on May 22, 1891. 

A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896. Although Housman continued to write poems, it wasn't until 1922, when he learned that Moses Jackson was dying in British Columbia that he submitted Last Poems for publication and he inscribed a copy and had it sent to Jackson's family. Jackson died the following year. However much Housman's sexuality was a secret to the general public, some of his poems that had something closer to autobiographical content suggested as much on close reading. Housman left these poems for his brother to publish after his death.

Et ce fût tout. Moses Jackson doesn't explain Housman's sad life, but Philip Larkin, who called Housman "the poet of unhappiness," said of him that "no one else has reiterated his single message so plangently." Reviewing a biography of Housman in 1979,(5) Larkin  closes with a curious paragraph:

“To be more unhappy than unfortunate suggests some jamming of the emotions whereby they are forced to re-enact the same situation even though it no longer exists, but for Housman it did still exist. If unhappiness was the key to poetry , the key to unhappiness was Moses Jackson. It would be tempting to call this neurosis, but there is a shorter word. For as Housman himself said, anyone who thinks he has loved more than one person has simply never really loved at all.”

Larkin was probably telling more about himself than he wished to, but he was saying what he knew about love, and at a point in his life (only a few years before his own death) when he was certain that it was true.


(1) Ironically, what is today probably Auden's most popular poem, "Stop all the clocks," is quite Housmanesque.
(2) Laurence Housman included in Additional Poems, an inscription "written by A.E.H on the flyleaf of a copy of Manilius, Book I, which he gave to Walter Headlam":

Here are the skies, the planets seven,
And all the starry train;
Content you with the mimic heaven,
And on the earth remain.
(3) Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (London: John Lehman, 1952).
(4) Sixteen days after the publication of Laurence Housman's essay, on July 27, 1967, homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain under the Sexual Offences Act .
(5) Richard Perceval Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (London: Oxford University Press, 1979).